


our better selves

by meritmut



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-25 17:40:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on <a href="http://vorchenzasmoved.tumblr.com/post/59447885925/thor-au-in-which-sif-falls-with-loki-whose-powers">this</a>.</p><p>(Currently on hiatus. As of September 2015, working on it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Falling hurts.

This, Sif thinks, ought to have come as less of a surprise.

(It's the last clear thought she is capable of for some time.)

The twisting branches of the cosmos are in uproar. Proud Asgard, the glimmering golden crown atop Yggdrasill's mighty boughs, forgets sometimes that it is not alone among them: it is the First Realm, but many there are and what affects the one will affect the others. The turbulence of the bifröst’s destruction will ripple out across the stars as swiftly and fatally as a supernova, to shake the foundations of the galaxy and shatter the fragile equilibrium of innumerable warlike empires whose peace hangs in eternal balance. And through it all, through meteors blazing firewhite and fierce across the protesting heavens like an explosion at the heart of a frozen moon; between atmospheres shifting and roiling as a vast and luminescent ocean...Sif falls.

Not through empty space, cold and soundless and suffocating. The great void is no more than a whisper of some long-forgotten night hanging on a breath at the edge of everything, and it is through the Branches of the World Tree itself - through fire and air and light and wind and crushing darkness all at once - that Sif tumbles. Solar cyclones whipped up by the fatal fissuring of the rainbow bridge rip the air from her lungs even as the churning heat of a billion storm-tossed stars lays searing hands upon her skin, and rips that too.

It had begun and ended so swiftly she could've blinked and missed it. The ground itself had seemed to buck beneath her feet, the bridge on which she stood twisting and cracking in the elemental clashing of two tremendous powers, the young princes, and as the world broke apart she had found herself robbed of more than her balance. How anyone could have survived the cataclysm that destroyed the bridge...how she survives even now, though it feels otherwise... _how_...the fires sear through her veins to consume conscious thought and it's all she can do to breathe, but she knows that she lives.

Just. She puts too little faith in immortality to hold to it now.

And still she falls.

At first there was only light; light that blinded and burned with its intensity; terrible, incandescent light that felt to her like monstrous claws raking every inch of her exposed flesh. When it receded - when colour marked dizzying spikes across her vision and the screaming winds tore stinging tears from her eyes to blur what was hardly clear to begin with - the pain was immediate and breathtaking.

She is not alone out here, knows he must fall with her and that he too must feel the agony in every part of him, that if her ears were not ringing with the bestial howl of interstellar storms she might hear him shriek above it...and the thought does her no good. This immolation sings in her bones as much as his, a torturous bonfire of everything Sif is or was.

_(I will pass through the fires.)_

_(I will come out clean.)_

The light splinters, fractures and blazes out in a spiralling conflagration before her eyes but she's passing through it, tossed on the waves of the cosmic seas at breakneck speed - and in a split second of blinding lucidity she sends out a prayer that whatever catches her - whichever surface is rising to meet her even as she plummets unchecked through the deadly emptiness of a broken branch and a trackless sky towards it - is soft enough to leave the _breakneck_ purely in the realms of metaphorical.

_(Bones mend.)_

Waves of pain scythe through her, the claws sink deep and through the haze of agony Sif thinks she must have no skin left, that she will skate close to death out here in the wilds and mayhaps she will skate too far, but not before the torment of this descent has stripped her to the core.

_(Skin heals.)_

_(I will pass.)_

And Ymir only knows what the fall will do to Loki, who by all the signs had lost the core of himself to madness already and needed no assistance in unravelling from the inside out...

_(Close to death, but no further.)_

Loki. Not the Loki she knows. Knew. Might once have known.

_(Let the fires take him too.)_

And if she is to die before ever reaching the land of their exile, then the matter of breaking the fall is surely immaterial.

_(Whatever comes, let it come.)_

_(Immaterial. Always looking on the bright side, you hold to that, Sif.)_

The fall must end sometime. Somewhere. Space is limitless and ineffably vast, but it is not empty. Exile or no, the Mother will catch her and this will be over. 

Nothing is ever broken that cannot be mended.

_(I am Sif. I am Sif. Sif. My name is Sif.)_

She has never fallen so far nor so hard that she could not get back up again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I got shouted at, so here's another one.

Getting up from this particular landing proves more difficult than Sif might have expected, had she not just plummeted into it from half a galaxy away. As it is, having just done precisely that, it's more or less exactly as difficult as she anticipated, and the only unexpected variable is that she's alive to actually do it.

 _Rising_ isn't the right word for it. No, more like a stagger.

The ground is both solid and shifting beneath her feet, a hard-packed wasteland of dirt and sand stirred up by the collision of an iron-boned Asgardian with its surface. Groaning and gasping, winded and dazed, she curls her fingers into the reddish soil until the pain coiling in every fibre of her battered body begins to take form, to retreat to specific areas in her joints and muscles. She uses the dirt to anchor herself, to fix herself into something strong and real and hard-to-destroy. The earth. There is nothing stronger. Lying on her side, she lets her cheek rest against the sun-baked ground. Connected to this conduit of elemental energy, she focusses on mending her multitudinous injuries.

She heals quickly, but that matters little when there's so _much_ to heal.

Blearily she gazes upon her limbs, taking in as much as she can while moving as little as possible. Her skin...her hands look relatively normal - a little pink, the nail-beds crusted with dirt and blood, her knuckles grazed raw, nothing new for a soldier. Yet still she feels as if she's been scraped clean, as if that excoriating light had passed through and into her and emptied her out. She feels hollow. If she moved too far now she thinks she'd hear her skeleton rattling, tender flesh and vaporised blood no longer there to cushion it.

All in all, she has seen better centuries.

_I like not this method of travelling. Give me a horse any time._

With a groan like a tonne-weight door being torn off its hinges, Sif pushes herself up onto her elbows and looks out over the land in which she is now an exile.

_Bleak._

Tan dust, red dirt, an unforgiving sky bleached white by the merciless sun...were it not for the half-hearted upstarts of greenery here and there she'd fear to have fallen straight down to one of Múspellsheimr's poles. Nothing endures there, not even the giants, but here there is life.

_Midgard. We were here not hours ago._

There is life, and Loki. She sees him long before he picks her out of the shimmering haze that dances upon the earth like a wisp. He seems in no better shape than she...if anything, worse, he's still dragging himself out of unconsciousness, but by the time Sif has regained at least superficial command of her extremities and hauled herself to her feet, wobbling in a manner that's frankly embarrassing, Loki is sitting up and staring, dead-eyed, at his own hands.

She must make some noise as she moves, but he doesn't seem to hear. Cautiously, aware of his reckless strength and the fever that grips his mind - that has incurred murderous madness in his recent actions - she approaches him, hand at her belt and the short knife she keeps there. Even more cautiously, once she is close enough, she breathes his name.

Loki visibly freezes, his hackles rising the moment her voice breaks through the concussion of crashing headlong into a planet, and lifts his head to fix those enormous green eyes of his upon her. In their cavernous depths she sees mirrored the twisting chaos of the universe the two of them have passed through, the violence and disorder and terror of a desperate descent that for Loki has yet to end.

As if unable to fully comprehend or believe her presence, he lets her name slip past his lips in a silent exhalation of surprise.

"Yes," she murmurs, fingering the hilt of her blade. His eyes focus enough to notice and a familiar sneer twists his mouth.

"Come to bring me home?" he mocks hoarsely, pressing a hand to his ribcage and wincing.

Sif rolls her eyes. "Stuck here with you," she corrects, "for good or ill."

The surprise clouds his gaze again and she draws a little satisfaction from that. It's not often she finds herself a step ahead of him and given what the past few days have held for them both, she'll take what petty victories she can get. Ignoring the way he mutters expletives to himself as he attempts to move without aggravating his wounds, Sif takes a gamble on those injuries keeping Loki from causing mischief at present and extends her hand toward him. At his suspicious scowl she looks pointedly at it as if to say _take it now, or I'll let you get yourself up. See how fun it is._

Swearing again, he reaches out and clasps her hand in his own. His skin is cold and clammy and he looks about as hale and hearty as the average plague victim, but he manages to sway to his feet with her assistance. Once upright he relinquishes contact as if she burns to the touch, the scowl returning to distort his features unpleasantly.

More than that, though...the fragility returns. His eyes gleam with more than rage and defeat as he gazes skyward, wondering where in those infinite skies their home might be found - and if, more importantly, it might ever be theirs again. Though she doubts he spares much of a thought for her now. The malady of his mind gave him no compunction about sending the Allfather's Destroyer after Sif and her fellows or even slaying his own brother, and she has little reason to suspect any change on that front. She watches him sharply as he scans the heavens, whatever hope he might have had for searching out a way back with his eyes alone fading visibly until his attentions lower to the world they are, for the moment, stuck on.

She's never seen a more bitter figure than Loki now, and there is nothing to suggest he is the same Loki she grew up with.

_He is an ill thing, this one. A shade of what was._

No, he is not the man she knows anymore, and she cannot treat him as such. Not when she is alone here with no guarantee that her strength will suffice to subdue him: loath as she is to even nurture the notion, there is vulnerability in her current situation. Loki may be weakened by the fall but he has the magic of stars crackling bright and perilous between his fingers and she has no way of knowing just _how_ weakened he is. So she makes a decision. She will regard him as if his madness lingers - as if he presents a viable threat to her life - until given inarguable evidence to the contrary. And that means keeping an eye on him. It wouldn't do to have him loose on a realm that might lag behind their own in some respects, but far outstrips them in others.

And so she straightens her spine, immediately regrets it as a spike of heat lances through her torso, and looks about them both.

"I suggest we find lodgings," she tells him.

He shoots her a look like she's speaking a foreign language, and her eyes roll upward again.

_How have I managed to endure him this long?_

In a _this should be extremely obvious_ sort of tone, she gestures to the rolling desert around them - and the small town visible on the horizon.

"We may be here some time."


	3. Chapter 3

"This will have to do."

Keeping Loki's hunched form squarely in her peripheral, Sif edges forward and looks around her at the room that - for now at least - is theirs. It's small and unprepossessing by her standards and those of her homeworld, but the room is easily big enough for the two narrow beds pressed against the opposite wall, and in a town as tiny as this she hadn't expected many options.

Indeed, though she had been prepared to ask the locals for somewhere the two of them could stay, she hadn't needed to. The sign above the only establishment offering bed and board proclaims it to be an inn, owned by stonemasons according to the same notice, and it lies on the main route into the cluster of buildings that make up this shambling little conurbation. Sif walks right in, trailing her disgruntled companion at her side and a few steps behind, and before remembering that she has nothing to offer in exchange for lodgings, realised that the building is completely empty.

She and Loki are the only guests at the Mason's Roadside Inn, and after a few minutes scouting around the place Sif comes to understand that they are also the first visitors for quite some time. If the place had ever bustled with life and custom, it does so no more.

It matters not, in the end, though. As soon as possible, which may mean waiting until the worst of their scrapes from the fall are healed, she means to take them north. North usually signifies cooler climes, more familiar ways of life and far easier hunting. Shelter, too. After seeing how swiftly the Midgardian powers had swooped in on Thor during his brief stay here, she does not intend to make the same mistake and draw attention to their presence. She only hopes Loki will play along - lest she have to neutralise him personally and drag him behind her like a carcass. Hardly glamorous, but hardly less than he deserves either.

Loki's derisive scoff cuts her thoughts off rudely.

She throws a stern glare over her shoulder at him. "For now it will suffice. I will discover us a map, and then we will move further north and seek out somewhere safer. I like not this desert."

"I'd like it more if you left me be," answers Loki coldly, seating himself on the edge of the bed and visibly cringing as he aggravates one of his many injuries. Sif has perched herself on her own bed too (she'd been careful to find them a room with separate beds, refusing to leave him alone for any length of time but unwilling to stray too close lest the movement be her last), and rolls her eyes at his sour tone.

"I care not."

And, as if that settles the matter - as it probably does, in her mind - Sif leans back against the headboard of her bed, pulls a short-bladed knife from her boot and begins to clean it with fastidious care, from hilt to tip. The weapon can't have seen combat since its last outing and therefore can't possibly have accumulated dirt, but she continues to wipe it down and ignore the deadly scowls Loki sends her way with the same determination.

In truth, it's easier to react and respond to an attack if one's weapon is already drawn. He remains unbound and free to move but Sif is taking no chances with Loki, giving him no leeway. Two days again he was her friend, a dear and true friend, yet now she can barely look at him without thinking of the dark blood marring Thor's fair features and the vacant cruelty of the Destroyer's fire. No friend of hers had set that thing upon them (and no friend of Loki's fared well that day), and it's that loss she mourns the most now that she has time to reflect.

Now he is her prisoner in all but name, and the only reason he lacks that is because she would need the Allfather's command to make it so. Until then, until she can find a way to reach Asgard and bring them both home, she means to keep Loki by her side and trust in Heimdall to watch over them both. If that means living as Midgardians until a door back opens up to them, so be it.

She has always sought a simple life, after all...


	4. Chapter 4

By the time the hazy warmth of the afternoon has faded into a clear-skied early evening, and the liquid yellow light spilling in through the windows has become a deep, mellifluous blue, Loki has fallen into a deep and restive slumber. He curls in upon himself as if to shield his body from further hurt, and very deliberately faces away from Sif - who lies still on her own bed content to leave him be. With the absence of his scathing sarcasm, the silence fills the air between them and she happily allows it to.

Compared to the asinine bickering that accompanied to their walk into town, the quiet is a blessing.

 _You're not suggesting we remain together, are you?_ he'd asked snidely as they walked. _I could do without your tiresome and miserably self-righteous carping in my ear for the foreseeable future, if I may be frank._

 _You may not_ , she'd snapped, and clenched her teeth against further response that would only fuel his acerbic commentary. As ever, it proved useless - she never could keep her temper around him.

_And since I am as trapped as you are, yet you possess the seiðr that may get us home, you're a fool if you think I'd let you go free. Until I know the will of the King, I will have you close._

_Little respect you have shown the will of the King in these past days_ , he spat, and she whirled in a flash of sun-bitten steel to level her blade at his throat. He only smiled.

_You are not, nor ever will be, my King. Your morning's reign saw the near-annihilation of a race and the attempted slaying of your brother. You deserve no throne._

She could feel the air around him writhe with thwarted fury as he sought to summon up a retort of sufficient venom, but nothing came forth for the rest of the walk. And now she waits for it as the shadows lengthen and there seems more sadness to Loki's hunched form than rage, nonetheless gladdened by the stillness of his liar's tongue.

_I'll miss this peace, when he wakes bored and hungry for an argument._

Absent-mindedly her eyes travel the length of him, picking out details she might not have noticed had she not been so close - and so free to look, with Loki asleep and oblivious to her contemplative stare. The inkstain fall of his hair, normally kept so sleek by his will and vanity, lies more tousled than she's ever seen it but still pushed determinedly behind his ears; to his tense shoulders, wracked with the weight of days and loss (little she knows of what drove him over the edge but she can guess, and hates every thought that guessing brings); the narrow waist beneath his familiar leathers, his garish armour stripped in the fall even as her own shield and glaive were lost. Anger burns for his actions, her pride pricked by the attack and by his presumption that he could make a great monarch of himself by no other grace than the lack of another head to wear the crown, but as she takes in the pitiable form of him tucked onto a bed too small for his long frame by inches, she reminds herself that he too is an exile, and from more than merely his homeworld.

In the silence of the deepening twilight Sif wonders if Loki truly has something left to cleave to in his life, anything he may cling to when the rest falls away. She knows he does not share her faith that they will get home again (even if she wavers in that faith she does not let herself doubt there is a way, there _must_ be a way), and it occurs to Sif that in all likelihood Loki does not see Asgard as home anymore. And if that's true, then he has no home at all, and the list of anchors grows thin. 

_There must be something. As surely as the sun will rise, there must be something left for him._

Sif is not uncharitable, merely angry; and nor is she a woman incapable of pity, but more than anything these thoughts of Loki move her to worry. Sorrow etches itself deeply in his sleeping form but she remembers the desperate fury that had consumed him only hours ago, and sends a prayer to the Mother that he will find himself something, anything to hold onto as this storm howls itself out. She is a creature of action and drive, rarely still enough to allow thought to overtake her, but she knows the need for an anchor to ground the soul and steady the mind, and the perils of being without one. 

It does not take stripping the silver shield of Asgard of her home and her loved ones for her understand that there is nothing so dangerous nor unpredictable, on this or any world, than a man with nothing to lose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise they'll do more than sit in their beds and sulk next chapter.


	5. Chapter 5

The stars are different here. To Sif some are barely recognisable; strange patterns weaving across a stranger galaxy. The sky itself proves a far duller spectacle on Earth than the variegated splendour of Asgard's own heavens, and though Sif searches for the kind of evening to which she is accustomed - great waves of light spilling in from the outer airs to turn the last hours of sunset into a luminous riot of violet and silver and rose and azure and lemon - it seems nightfall is a quieter affair on Midgard.

Resting her chin on one hand she leans against the windowsill, gazing out into the silver-speckled darkness and looking for familiar constellations as if somewhere amidst their ancient light the Mother Realm might look back.

Loath as Sif is to admit weakness when her courage has ever been a matter of pride, she is homesick. They have not been gone from the homeworld a day and she is already sore with longing for its glittering towers and ageless majesty, because this time she did not choose to leave it but was torn, through fire and thunder, from its embrace, and knows not if she will ever return.

 _There's no use in pessimism,_ she tells herself sternly, _for now, believe that there is a way, and focus on what is at hand at present._

It's hard not to miss Thor, though. Especially after she'd only just seen him brought back from his own brief banishment to Midgard. The dawn will bring a time for movement and action, but for now there's little to do but hope the prince and his kingdom are setting themselves to rights without the aid of their fiercest sword to guard the broken gate. There's no boast in the thought, either. She has earned that accolade and wears it as a warning to all.

Now, she lifts her gaze to the furthest stars and calls out to the one man she knows will be listening.

_Heimdall. Brother, Asgard is weakened and foes will gather in the long night. Look to them. I will manage us fine._

The far horizon curves and slopes above the shadowy bluffs on the edge of town, but above the night unfolds in an unbroken vault of shifting blues and - to the far west - the faintest hint of dimming gold. High above land or horizon she makes out the shimmering bolt of stars that forms the closest of Yggdrasill's branches to this realm, and wonders if it has a name. The people of Earth share a characteristic with her own kind in that they love to give names to the things of the cosmos, from the sprawling expanse of a mountain range to the least significant stream flowing from amongst its peaks.

It will certainly make their journey north swifter, having easy-identifiable landmarks through which to pass...

At her side Sif has a bowl of clean water hunted out from the dark inn, and she absently dabs at her knuckles to wash away the blood and dust that encrusts them. Her armour lies on her bed and from the pain that shot through her back when she removed her breastplate, she has worse injuries beneath her clothes than a mere scraped fist.

Loki wakes to find Sif washing her neck in the reflection of the water bowl. The angle of moonlight through the open window suggests it must be near to the witching hour - she's let him sleep all evening. Wincing at the bone-deep ache that flares throughout his entire body, he pulls himself into a seated position and waits for the moment to announce himself.

Ideally, he wouldn't have to. She'll only gripe at him. But given their close quarters it is rather inevitable.

He watches as Sif encounters difficulty trying to clean the back of her neck, the stubborn set to her jaw as she refuses to give up bringing a slight smile to his lips. The first true smile in days.

And his first charitable thought in days.

Amusing as it is to watch Sif struggle, Loki feels the pervasive itch of desert dust and dried blood upon his own skin (his nose is definitely broken after that ill-fated brush with Thor) and even his scalp, and knows that the only way to rid himself of it is to perform a good deed in exchange for another.

At least, that's what he tells himself as he pushes himself out of bed and crosses the room to stand at Sif's side, holding out his hand for the cloth.

Predictably, she glares at him as if he were a venomous snake.

Loki rolls his eyes. "I'll get what you can't reach," he offers quietly, though he offers nothing else. No remorse, nor plea for forgiveness. Only a moment's assistance.

Broken bridges aren't mended in a day, after all, and neither are the ones Loki burned yesterday.

Still Sif eyes him uneasily, but the discomfort of blood and sand on her skin must outweigh her distrust of him for he can see her suspicion softening gradually.

"You do not trust me, but you can trust that I mean no harm," he says in a reasonable voice.

Sif's lip curls. "As you say," she acquiesces, handing him the cloth. She turns her back on him to expose the hard curve of her naked shoulder and most of her back: her sleeveless tunic is pulled loose, allowing him to tug at it gently with one hand (making sure his fingers don't so much as come within a gnat's whisker of her skin, he doesn't need those memories rising to the surface now) while the other skims the rough cloth lightly from her ear, down the slope of her neck and over her left shoulder blade. This side of her body had caught the full impact of her inelegant crash-landing onto the desert ground, and even an Asgardian's prodigious rate of healing has met its match in the long grazes that mar her pale back like claws.

Carefully, unwilling to hurt her for fear of a clip round the skull, Loki rinses the cloth and washes away the rust-coloured blood and grit caught in Sif's wounds, until her bare back is as fair and clean as it was in the days of their youth, when they would swim together and think nothing of it.

Scars old and new mar her skin now, of course, but the recollection of a happier childhood shakes him and he pulls back as if burned. Sif glances over her shoulder questioningly.

"The wound is clean," Loki grits his teeth, forcing an expression of vague disdain onto his face.

She reads his intentions as if they were written across his features in ink.

"Alright," she nods, "my thanks. Now, your turn."

She holds out her hand for the cloth and dips it in the bowl, now stained a faint brown colour, as Loki turns to remove his shirt for her ministrations.

The white skin of his slender torso is a mess of bruises and scrapes, a pitiable sight even for Sif.

"Keep still," she orders, "this will likely sting."

He scoffs. "I'm sure I can bear it."

_Fine._

The first scrape of the cloth over his shoulder is harder than perhaps necessary but the low growl that escapes him is revenge enough for Sif. After that she moves more gently, but the warning hangs clearly in the air.

_Watch yourself, prince. I don't need a sword in my hand to make you wish the fall had killed you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Roommates AU's are fun, aren't they.
> 
> (Sif's probably going to be angry with him for a while yet. The shenanigans in Puente Antiguo pricked her pride and hurt Thor, Loki is currently Public Enemy No.1 for her.)
> 
> Here's a game to keep you all entertained until something actually happens.
> 
> Spot the _Joseph_ reference. I'm sorely tempted to stick one in every chapter from now.


	6. Chapter 6

The high halls of Asgard are shadowed with mourning. The Allfather keeps his own counsel and refuses all who seek him, Huginn and Muninn his only company - save for when he visits the ruins of the bridge and stands watch with Heimdall, ever loyal. They do not exchange words but there is an air of penance to the king's silence as he gazes out over the still sea, searching, sorrowing, waiting for word that never comes.

In her gardens and fountain-rooms the queen becomes a silver ghost, drifting among the muted golds of her citadel as if in some darkened corner she might find a way to bring home the ones who are lost. She saves her smiles for Thor but he wants none of them - he forbade any celebration of his own return from exile, could not rejoice when there is so much else to lament - and so she holds herself tall and austere and strong because she must, because she cannot feast the restoration of one son when the other is taken from her.

It's Thor who grieves the most for his brother, and for Sif. Frigg had watched as the bifröst shattered and could never have prevented it but Thor...he who could and tried to save them both, to his own mind, through his own fault lost both. The look in Loki's eyes as his grasping fingers found no anchor after the explosion, as he fell into the unravelling light of the rainbow bridge (a gentle name for such a violent passage) and then too the scything horror Thor had felt when he looked up to find the space Sif had occupied empty, her cry echoing on the air as she too was lost...on a day of many agonies it is hard to tell which fell hardest upon him.

Sometimes he joins his father and Heimdall on the bridge, sometimes he goes alone, and his questions remain the same as the days wear on and no progress is made toward the reparation of the bifröst. There are few souls in Asgard who comprehend its mechanisms now - what was once knowledge accessible to all is now held by most as sorcery, taken for granted as their way off-world but so rarely understood as more than their birthright.

_Loki would know. Loki would save himself. Loki has the power._

The thought gives Thor pause as he imagines what dark mischiefs his brother might wreak out there beyond the sea, with no one to find him or bring him home to face justice. It's a fear that is swiftly followed by guilt, for lost Loki might be but it will take more than that for Thor to cease to think of him as kin, and to doubt his brother so...

_Loki must bring himself home._

And he will not be alone, unchecked, Thor corrects. Sif will find him. If their journey brought them within a world of one another, she will find him.

*

She dreams of wolves, of hunger and cold and the dripping maws of monsters snapping at her heels as she pushes on through unfamiliar lands. She crosses plains bleached the colour of bone by a yellow moon that hangs in the sky like rotten wax, oily in the foul night airs. Mountains unfold themselves roughly beneath her fingers as she claws and scrabbles for purchase on their treacherous slopes, only for them to crumble in her hands and leave her spinning through empty space in a breathless descent into darkness. And then she's running again, always running, and never looking over her shoulder at what lies behind.

A sudden storm flashes white fire across the sky and Sif looks up for him.

Looks up, in time to see the stars fall.

*

Loki stares at the pale hand before him as if it belongs to someone else. Long fingers, tapered delicately to ragged nails still rimmed in desert dust no matter how hard he'd scrubbed at them last night, curl into fists and out again to splay in the air.

It makes no sense, but unless the evidence of his eyes deceives him there can be no other conclusion.

 _There can be one other._ Yes, one other conclusion - that perhaps, at the end of it all, he has lost his mind. It's not so implausible. Tumbling from the broken bridge as space itself seemed to buck and twist around them, the seams of the universe coming undone in the shockwaves, he had felt his wits hanging too. He might have survived the fall to Midgard without grievous injury but mayhap his sanity did not.

_Do the mad have the mind to doubt themselves, though? If I am witless, how can I have the wit to wonder?_

As reassurances go, it's meagre.

There is a touch of cosmic irony to the situation, Loki muses grimly: and to think, he'd thought to hold his magic over Sif's head as some kind of guarantee for his safety...or at least, to irritate her with the knowledge that she wouldn't get home without him. He suspects vexing the self-righteous swordswoman might yet prove his only entertainment on this arid realm.

 _How the Nornir love to twist their threads_ , he ponders with no small amount of bitterness, but puts the thought aside as he hears Sif stirring. Letting the curtain fall back into place and casting the room into dull shadow once more, he retreats back to his own bed to await her.

The lack of pain as she wakes puts Sif immediately in a better mood than yesterday. Her bones ache with the aftershocks of a monumental impact but aside from that (which is easily ignored, easily overcome by her warrior's willpower) she feels a little more like herself. Like there is nothing in all the worlds that she might find insurmountable, no obstable she cannot find a way around - or through. She tugs the feeling closer as if it were a cloak, wears it next to her skin and faces the morning a little cheerier for it.

_This is just another quest. The challenges may be different and the foes unseen, but challenges and foes they remain and the prize at the end is home._

The bedroom is suffused with a dull glow, sunlight filtering through the ugly orange cloth of the drapes to fill the space with a haze of dustmotes, caught mid-air and transfixed. Sif hadn't shut the curtains before she turned to her bed in the night but Loki must have done so, and still her body is so accustomed to routine that even on another world she wakes at sunrise - even with the drapes drawn so tightly that no crack of light gets between them. It's a foul colour, she observes, missing the panels of soft cream voile that give shade to her own chambers on Asgard.

The little things begin to prick at her, things she had never thought she might come to mourn. The sigh of wind through the whistling spires or the glint of noon sunshine on the citadel heights; the softness of sheepskin beneath her feet as she rises on a morning...the certainty that she belonged. There is no such certainty here.

Sif tries to force the thought away. Why does it grieve her so? She leaves the First Realm all the time and for far longer than they've been away already. Her own bed lies cold as often as she occupies it.

But then, her absences have always been with her companions on errands or quests or skirmishes, and never against her will. And even with the threat of death hanging over their heads, there was always the promise of a home to return to. Now, all the old sureties have been blasted apart. Midgard might yet become home by necessity rather than choice.

"I fear we have a problem," Loki is watching her when she turns to him, something close to apprehension on his face. At her sharp glance he frowns, gazing down at his hands.

She had left him awake last night, staring moodily out of the window after he'd laid washcloth and bowl to one side and turned his back to let Sif readjust her clothes. (How polite he is, with nothing and nobody to save him from her sword if he takes a step too far.) And still, despite the fact that she wouldn't trust him as far as she could throw him (which was once the length of the training yard and it was years before Thor let him forget it), she had slept easily in the same room as him. Either her defences had been so low or he'd ensorcelled her into dropping her guard, but she'd fallen asleep straight away after that with nary a thought towards keeping Loki secure.

She needn't have worried about sorcery, as it turns out.

Something of the frailty in his eyes makes Sif put her anger aside for the moment. "Speak," she encourages him with more patience than he perhaps deserves, and, emboldened by the unexpected softness, Loki looks up at her again almost....beseechingly.

"My magic," he begins hesitantly, "...my seiðr. I think...it would seem, that it is gone."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woooo, twist.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, a filler chapter.

The revelation gives Sif much to think on as they move slowly north.

They go by darkness, making light work of the first challenge set before them - finding garb that better hides them in this world. There's little honour to be found in staking out the shadows while Loki uses his craft and guile to fetch them both Midgardian clothing, but Sif resolves herself to bear it in silence. If thievery is a crime here too then it is a necessary one, and one that will save them trouble on the road ahead (she remembers how, only yesterday, the ones who had taken in and sheltered Thor had stared so openly at her own gleaming armour, the perilous flash of her glaive, the golden arc of her shield...and how both now are gone).

Only yesterday? It seems a lifetime since the quartet had descended upon Earth and sought out their prince, since the Destroyer's flames were the worst of her concerns. She has no idea if they're anywhere near that town now, nor any real wish to find out. The fewer that know of their presence on Midgard, the safer they will be.

(And the safer Midgard will be, the further she can keep Loki's mind from it.)

*

"You know, some of us still like to sleep at night. Reminds us we're human."

The bespectacled young woman slides a green ring binder onto a cluttered desk and frowns, nudging a few stray papers back into place before the file's owner realises that the binder might have been dropped accidentally on the way over, and might have broken a bit. Honestly, Jane could pick out the slightest discrepancy in the datasets her delicate nose is currently pressed against but when it comes to her personal possessions she's borderline negligent, and if she's not likely to notice the broken clasp on her file then far be it from Darcy to point it out to her.

"Hmm?" Predictably, the distracted astrophysicist only catches the tail-end of Darcy's greeting, and offers an amused counter in the most Janeish manner possible. "What can be more human to want to explore all that, Darce?" She waves her hand, stained pink and orange by the careless use of highlighters, in the general direction of the ceiling. She means the stars, presumably, but Darcy's running on empty tonight and thinking longingly of her bed.

"The need for rest. That's pretty human. When was the last time you ate?"

The hesitant silence is all the answer she needs.

"Right, step away from the charts."

Jane barely spares her a glance. "Not right now, I think I'm-"

"In need of a meal and a _rest_ ," insists Darcy. Normally, she knows she can trust Jane to take care of herself, or at the very least remember the occasional mealtime - and the fact that caffeine is not a substitute for sleep. In the days since Thor's departure and failure to return, however, she's been virtually robotic. The fervour with which she scans her charts and circles certain constellations (apparently she's attempting to cross-match their own stars with those that appeared on the night of the bridge's descent to find the quadrant in which Asgard is most likely to reside, though to Darcy it looks more like playing join-the-dots with a metric shit-tonne of very similar dots) borders on the religious, the hope in her eyes each time she approaches a breakthrough enough to convince the most sceptical of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s assigned consultants that maybe they really are making progress. Maybe Jane really can recreate the bridge. Maybe it's more than theory.

Maybe.

Frankly, the consultants could be pulling their weight a little more. Everytime Darcy has passed through the lab this week they seemed to have been spending more time examining Jane's homemade equipment than gearing their intellects toward her holy mission. _Gods in the stars_ aren't apparently as interesting as machinery jury-rigged from old computers and what looks suspiciously like a seismograph.

Not that Jane's looked up from her work long enough to notice that S.H.I.E.L.D. is even still here. If she had, Darcy suspects she might have had a few stern words to say (the offer of monetary compensation after the confiscation of her equipment still rankles her pride), but she is consumed by the thought of bridging the universe to find Asgard and while she seems to have forgotten what her body needs to function, she has never been more alive for it.

Rummaging around in one of her plastic bags and emerging armed with their favourite Indian takeaway, Darcy approaches her boss and waves one of the cartons gently under Jane's nose. "It's after three, Jane. There won't be many stars left to look at soon, might as well call it a night. We can start again tomorrow."

"Three?" Frowning, Jane glances at one of the monitors keeping a constant watch on the night and her eyes widen as she notes the position of the stars outside. "Yeah...yeah alright. Food."

"And sleep. Then work again," smiles the younger woman. A watch on her wrist and at least four computers showing the time on their desktops, and Jane still needs only to glance at the stars to know the hour.

At that thought, Darcy feels almost bad for dragging her away from them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't keep an idea in my head long enough to type it out and I have several large volumes to read for uni, so the next few chapters might be sparse and unsatisfactory until I get everyone where I want them (this one's just setting the scene a bit more). I'm trying to avoid the curse this time...


End file.
